Income Tool Time

SEO and positioning your website to rank top spots in the search engines require some careful planning. Just like setting up a business or going to war, it requires strategizing for optimal results. Diving straight into the internet without any clear game plan is time-wasting, dangerous and more often than not, a futile attempt to rank any website for maximum targeted traffic. Let’s dwell a little deeper into some useful SEO and positioning tips to get your web pages indexed and ranking faster.

1. SEO and Positioning Tip 1 – Determine Your Objective

What is your objective in optimizing your website? Is it for maximum general traffic or targeted niche traffic? Once again, webmasters are unable to get this part clear. Many think that driving as much traffic as possible to their websites is the way to go. Unfortunately, this is a big pitfall. A web site may attract loads of traffic but yet don’t perform as well as another with little traffic but making more sales. Know what your objective is, to sell more products or to get more people to visit your website. If you are building an interest-based website or hobby website, perhaps getting maximum general traffic is the right solution for you.

2. SEO and Positioning Tip 2 – Plan Your Keywords Right

This is applicable for all websites that intend to tap into free organic traffic. By that, I mean SEO and positioning high in search engines for specific keywords. One clue for you before you compile your keyword list is to understand that search engines rank individual web pages, not websites. The systematic way to do it is to first look at your objective of SEO and positioning. If you are targeting a niche market, for example SEO tools, target the niche keyword SEO tools for your home page, and drill into this main keyword for related keywords such as SEO Elite, effective SEO tools, etc to target for each internal web page.

Don’t make the mistake like many webmasters do in targeting one main keyword for the entire website. The smart approach to SEO and positioning is to target a list of low competition, moderate demand keywords and rank well for them. This would potentially drive more targeted traffic, than to blindly hit at one main keyword.

3. SEO and Positioning Tip 3 – Simple Well-Thought On-page Optimization

Use your keywords in the meta-tags, web page title, sub-headers and web content. Make your web content unique. A keyword density of 1-3% and word count of more than 400 words is ideal for on-page optimization. Create a sitemap page to make search engines spiders love your web pages. This helps in indexing the internal pages fast.

4. SEO and Positioning Tip 4 – Effective Off-page Optimization Techniques

Building link popularity of a website is far more crucial than any other factors for SEO and positioning for top search engine ranking. But pay attention to who your link partners are. Trade links with websites in a similar niche, and high Google PR if possible. Links from authority websites such as educational or government websites, ie domain names with .edu or .gov extensions are valuable. Buying links from link partners is perfectly fine if you can verify the quality of the websites. Search engines nowadays can be quite demanding and look for quality more than quantity of links.

5. SEO and Positioning Tip 5 – Using Search Engine Optimization Tools

Webmasters used to do everything traditionally from on-page optimization to off-page optimization such as emailing fellow webmasters to exchange links. Technology and software development has made it much easier for SEO and positioning websites using search engine optimization tools. These smart tools are designed to automate all manual tasks necessary to grab a top search engine ranking for a website fast. Almost every webmaster has one or two of these in their arsenal as they are big time and money savers.

Feel free to drop by at my blog to read more about search engine optimization tools and grab a free ebook worth more than $97 packed with detailed SEO tips and techniques to help your SEO efforts. This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author’s name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.

Davion W
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/seo-and-positioning-tips-rank-high-and-fast-100403.html

So you have built the online shop, found the supplier to get the goods from and set up a cart and accounting system…

Now if someone would just come to your site and buy something.

It is one of the sad ironies of life that one of the reasons people often give for leaving a 9-5 job to set up their own website at home is they are tired of the traffic.

And that is exactly what they are looking for now.

Traditionally there were several ways to get this done:

* Use the services of greedy… err business-savvy eBay or other puny… er growing online auction services.
* Pay for ads through Google Adwords
* Buy banner advertising
* Write articles and comment on forums.
Thankfully, several new web 2.0 addresses have proved to be a hit with not only netizens but also search engines.

Web 2.0 platforms are a boon to smaller ecommerce operators. They don’t only allow you to bring more people to your site they also let you communicate with your paying and potential customers and build your service into one that is more targeted towards the people that buy your products.

There are several different types of web 2.0 platform that you, as an ecommerce operator, should be aware of:

* Video platforms
* Material hosting sites and blogs
* Social bookmarking sites
Video sites
Rich media, like video didn’t even register on peoples’ radars five years ago but that has changed with the rise of YouTube.

Now the general consensus by marketers is that you risk ignoring video at your peril.

While YouTube is the undoubted king of video sites there is are many others on the internet with different benefits and different audiences, and it is often beneficial to release your video onto a number of different sites, much like wholesale electronics supplier Chinavasion has done. These are only two of the video sites online and a Google search will bring up many more results.

Good examples of this are the Chinavasion Metacafe page and Chinavasion Revver page.

Don’t forget, when making videos, short is sweet and including descriptions and tags is always essential.

Content Sites
There are a number of content hosting sites online including Squidoo, Hubpages and some of the document hosting sites on the internet as well as blogging platforms like wordpress and moveable type.

Blogs can be excellent content hosting solutions that constantly draw attention back to your site and your products. Some, like wordpress are useful in that you can either set one up that is hosted on their server (like http://goodecommercetips.wordpress.com) or download their software and plug it directly into your site. The Chinavasion blog is one such blog. There are plusses and minuses with both scenarios and it is a decision to weigh up carefully.

Social Bookmarking Sites
Once you’ve created content you’re going to need to get somebody to see it.

A good way to draw attention to your site, and to the resources you create for people is through social bookmarking sites.

These sites are basically ways for netizens to share sites that they think are interesting with other people and are loved by both netizens and search engines.

One popular example of this is Stumbleupon. A Stumbleupon blog can create a lot of attention on its own right as seen by the Chinavasion Stumbleupon blog.

Social networking sites, like MySpace and Facebook are a different type of social bookmarking. While you can in fact use these to share your links with people they are also used to communicate with your customers, keep them informed of what is happening at your company and see what else is happening.

The new Friendfeed service is a great example of this, as seen by the Chinavasion Friendfeed room, with people sharing different links and discussing what they have found.

When putting items through social bookmarking sites it may pay to consider masking your actions a little by also submitting other links, particularly when using sites like Stumbleupon or Digg.

So what pitfalls do you have to take consideration when marketing through web 2.0?

There are two main concerns. The first is that you remain aware of your reputation online and the second is you take into consideration the time getting involved takes.

You develop a good reputation by providing great content. If something appears to be poorly written or lacking in useful information you risk getting a bad reputation.

Another way to ‘loose face’ is to fail to develop a relationship with customers On sites like YouTube, or in the case of Chinavasion Metacafe, check up on videos from time to time and answer any questions that clients and potential clients have. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to deal with every flamer or troll, in fact it is probably more beneficial to ignore the people who seem to be just posting a comment to get someone arguing with them.

Essentially if you cut corners or try to trick a customer it’s going to hit you hard in the long run. Treat people fairly and they will remain loyal to you.

Those are just some of the excellent web 2.0 posting tools out there on the internet that make great marketing tools for up and coming e-commerce operators strapped for cash.

Rose Li
http://www.articlesbase.com/home-business-articles/ecommerce-web-20-tools-everybody-should-know-695562.html